Color Therapy: Change your Underwear, Change your Mood

 

Natural Wisdoms: A regular feature:

Color is an amazing gift from nature. It is a living vibrational energy that is perceived and absorbed by your senses. It has a subtle yet potent interaction with your emotions and brain.

The colors you wear can reflect how you are feeling to the world, you can intentionally wear colors to shift your mood or you can hide from the world (blacks the color which shrinks your presence)

There are colors which stimulate the thinking (left) side of your brain and colors which stimulate the creative (right) side of your brain. There are colors to help you relax and others to energise and excite. Whilst some colors encourage communication others evoke stillness.

Did you know that yellow is the first color perceived by the human eye.

Below are some useful insights from my journey with color workshops over the past two decades.

Change your underwear: Change your mood:

Simply by changing the color of your underwear you can subtly fuel your energy reserves or balance your emotional needs. It is easy to do, no one need know what you are doing and I guarantee you will feel a difference.

Feeling tired grab a red pair, stressed out try some calming blue, emotionally upset go for the orange or in need of some optimism switch to yellow.

Color you world for balance:

1: Red will give you a boost of energy whilst stimulating your immune system. Red can activate your appetite - beware. It evokes action and passion and a perfect color if you tend to be a procrastinator.

2: Orange will allow you to digest your emotions without holding onto stuff and encourage emotional balance and optimism. It is warm hearted and offers a sense of community whilst offering a feeling of tolerance. Perfect color for social gatherings.

3: Blue is tranquil and peaceful. It has been proven to reduce pain levels. It aids in acquiring inner peace and supports creativity. Blue is associated with the right hand side of the brain.

4: Green refreshes, encourages growth, is balancing and healing. It is nurturing and associated with the heart. Green promotes prosperity and well being. Green of course is a combination of blue and yellow.

5: Yellow lifts your spirits and offers you a positive feeling. It evokes confidence and joy. It is connected to your mental thinking and improves attention to detail and academic achievement. It improves concentration and clarity of thought.

6: Purple is known to heighten your intuition. It is similar to blue in that it offers comfort and calm. A great color for meditation.

Experiment with color:

 
Don’t take my word for it though, experiment for yourself. Notice how different you feel wearing blue or orange or even red undies or any item of clothing.

To further excite you into experimenting with color therapy I’ve added a few special treats to whet your appetite.

 

Color your wallet for wealth:

 
Years ago after listening to a color therapist a group of my girlfriends all switched to green wallets. Green represents growth, abundance and prosperity. It is the color most often associated with money. In Feng Shui green relates to the wood energy which is associated with wealth. You might also like to read the Tao of a full happy wallet if you are keen to boost your money vibes.

Lose weight with color:

 
Research has shown that blue is the most likely color to suppress your appetite. A blue light in your fridge may be just the trick you need. Blue is not a color you think of when you imagine food. Nature does not offer many blue foods except for a few such as blueberries. Red will stimulate your appetite and encourage fast eating. Notice how many take-aways have red signs or decor.

Link: http://www.wellsphere.com/mind-body-article/color-therapy-change-your-underwear-change-your-mood/6973

Can cognitive behavioural therapy really change our brains? (BBC)

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a type of talking therapy that's used to treat a wide range of mental health problems, from depression and eating disorders to phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It recommends looking at ourselves in a different way that might prove useful for all of us in everyday life. But what happens to our brains when we have CBT?

What is cognitive behavioural therapy?

CBT is based on the idea that problems aren't caused by situations themselves, but by how we interpret them in our thoughts. These can then affect our feelings and actions.

The way we think about a situation can affect how we feel and how we act

For example, if someone you know walks by without saying hello, what's your reaction?

You might think that they ignored you because they don't like you, which might make you feel rejected. So you might be tempted to avoid them the next time you meet. This could breed more bad feeling between you both and more "rejections", until eventually you believe that you must be unlikeable. If this happened with enough people, you could start to withdraw socially.

But how well did you interpret the situation in the first place?

 

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Common errors in thinking style

• Emotional reasoning - e.g. I feel guilty so I must be guilty
• Jumping to conclusions - e.g. if I go into work when I'm feeling low, I'll only feel worse
• All-or-nothing thinking - e.g. if I've not done it perfectly, then it's absolutely useless
• Mental filtering - e.g. noticing my failures more than my successes
• Over generalising - e.g. nothing ever goes well in my life
• Labelling - e.g. I'm a loser

CBT aims to break negative vicious cycles by identifying unhelpful ways of reacting that creep into our thinking. 

"Emotional reasoning is a very common error in people's thinking," explains Dr Jennifer Wild, Consultant Clinical Psychologist from Kings College London. "That's when you think something must be true because of how you feel."

CBT tries to replace these negative thinking styles with more useful or realistic ones.

This can be a challenge for people with mental health disorders, as their thinking styles can be well-established.

How do we break negative thinking styles?

Some psychological theories suggest that we learn these negative thinking patterns through a process called negative reinforcement. 

 

Graded exposure can help people confront their phobias

For example, if you have a fear of spiders, by avoiding them you learn that your anxiety levels can be reduced. So you're rewarded in the short term with less anxiety but this reinforces the fear.

To unlearn these patterns, people with phobias and anxiety disorders often use a CBT technique called graded exposure. By gradually confronting what frightens them and observing that nothing bad actually happens, it's possible to slowly retrain their brains to not fear it.

How does cognitive behavioural therapy work on the brain?

Primitive survival instincts like fear are processed in a part of the brain called the limbic system. This includes the amygdala, a region that processes emotion, and the hippocampus, a region involved in reliving traumatic memories.

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“Start Quote

It seems that CBT really can change your brain and rewire it.”

Dr Paul Blenkiron, Consultant Psychiatrist 

 

Brain scan studies have shown that overactivity in these two regions returns to normal after a course of CBT in people with phobias. 

What's more, studies have found that CBT can also change the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher-level thinking.

So it seems that CBT might be able to make real, physical changes to both our "emotional brain" (instincts) and our "logical brain" (thoughts). 

Intriguingly, similar patterns of brain changes have been seen with CBT and with drug treatments, suggesting that psychotherapies and medications might work on the brain in parallel ways.

How effective is cognitive behavioural therapy? 

Of all the talking therapies, CBT has the most clinical evidence to show that it works. 

Studies have shown that it is at least as effective as medication for many types of depression and anxiety disorders. 

But unlike many drugs, there are few side effects with CBT. After a relatively short course, people have often described long-lasting benefits. 

"In the trials we've run with post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and social anxiety disorder, we've seen that even when people stop the therapy, they continue improving because they have new tools in place and they've made behavioural and thinking style changes," Dr Wild explains.

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Find out more

• Watch David, 25, and Wayne, 24, use CBT to help with their mental health in Inside My Mind on BBC Three, 7 August 2013 at 8pm, and afterwards on iPlayer
• Find out more about mental health in the It's a Mad World season on BBC Three

CBT may not be for everyone, however. 

Since the focus is on tackling the here and now, people with more complicated roots to their mental problems which could stem from their childhood, for example, may need another type of longer-term therapy to explore this. 

CBT also relies on commitment from the individual, including "homework" between therapy sessions. It can also involve confronting fears and anxieties, and this isn't always easy to do. 

Ultimately, as with many types of treatment, some people will benefit from CBT more than others and psychologists and neuroscientists are beginning to unravel the reasons behind this. 

Fuente: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/23590545

What is a phobia? (BBC)

A phobia is an intense fear or feeling of anxiety that occurs only in a particular situation that frightens you. 

This might be something as seemingly logical as a fear of heights, or as illogical as a fear of the colour green. At other times you don't feel anxious. For example, if you have a phobia of spiders (as millions of people do), you only feel anxious when there's a spider around, otherwise you feel fine. 

About one in ten people has a significant phobia, although few people seek treatment.

People develop phobias to all sorts of things. Each phobia has its own name. Some (of a very long list) include:

• Musophobia - fear of mice
• Peladophobia - fear of bald people
• Amathophobia - fear of dust
• Pnigophobia - fear of choking or smothering
• Maieusiophobia - fear of childbirth
• Homichlophobia - fear of fog
• Arachibutyrophobia - fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth

Phobias make people avoid situations they know will make them anxious, but this can make the phobia worse. A person's life can become increasingly dominated by the precautions they take to avoid a situation they fear. You may know there's no real danger and you may feel embarrassed by your fear, but you're still unable to control it. It's better to confront your fears, even if it's in a very careful way or with the help of a trained therapist. 

A phobia is more likely to go away if it began after a distressing or traumatic event.

What's the treatment?

Cognitive behavioural therapy - a 'talking treatment' where you learn all about the thing or situation you are scared of and how to change your behaviour - has a high success rate in phobias. Your GP can refer you.

Antidepressant medications may also be used even if you aren't depressed. They work by interfering with brain chemicals (neurotransmitters) such as serotonin which may be involved in causing anxiety symptoms.

Anti-anxiety medication such as diazepam are rarely used, as they can be addictive, but may be offerred on ‘one-off’ occasions such as for people with flying phobias who have to take a flight for work or holiday. 

Source:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/emotional_health/mental_health/mind_phobias.shtml